Guilty pleasure poetry

Tag Archives: poetry

Amy was born in Dover in 1978 and grew up in Kent and South Shields. Her pamphlet Instead of Stars was published by tall-lighthouse in 2009. She is a poet-in-residence for ethical lingerie brand Holloway Smith Noir. She co-runs The Shuffle, a monthly poetry reading series at London’s Poetry Café and is the co-editor of The Shuffle anthology series. Amy lives in London, working as a civil servant. You can find her poems, along with some photography and clutter on her tumblr Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat and her tweets @msamykey.

Jonathan Steffen is a modern troubadour, whose work encompasses poetry, short stories, novels, literary translations, songs and instrumental music.

He has just had a collection of poems, Colour of Love, published by Accumen Publishing.

His work has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and magazines, including the London Magazine, The Spectator, the New Statesman & Society, Signals, Firebird, BABEL, Outposts, Acumen, Orbis and Poem for the Day. He has also published full-length translations of novels and academic works from the German and the French. Jonathan has widely published poems, short stories, essays and literary translations. His poem Falcon to the Falconer has travelled world wide.

April will be a fruitful month for poetry, with not one but TWO excellent poetry events happening in Beaconsfield and its surroundings…

Our next evening of featured poets & open mic will be at the wonderful Jolly Cricketers, in Seer Green, Beaconsfield. As you can see from the picture, our next loose theme for this next event will be ‘Maps’. You can share poetry you’ve written on the theme, or ignore it altogether.

Our featured poets are: Jim Bennett, Amy Key, Jonathan Steffen and Christine Webb. Posts in the lead up to the event will appear on this website with more information on these poets.

To put you in the mood, here is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop ‘The Map’:

The Map

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
-the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
-What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.

Lucy accidentally moved to Oxford a few years ago. She now runs the Oxford branch of Hammer and Tongue there with Tina [Sederholm, who is also reading on 11th!] She goes about performing poems at arts nights and festivals around the country, and is working on her first solo show, which will be touring later this year. Lucy blogs about her misadventures here (http://lucyinthepubwithcider.tumblr.com/). You can also follow her on twitter at @lucyayrton

Lily Morris, from Beaconsfield, was one of ten national winners in the Poetry Society’s ‘SLAMbassadors‘ competition in 2010 after her poem, ‘Passport’, which was written in a slam poetry workshop at school, was chosen by Adisa the Verbaliser and Joelle Taylor. She usually likes to write in free verse, and is according to Joelle Taylor ‘the world’s worst emcee’.

Dan Holloway writes poetry and prose but is happiest behind a microphone. In 2010 he won the international spoken word show Literary Death Match, and has performed at the likes of Grit Lit at Brighton Fringe and Rough Trade Records. He is the author of several novels available on Kindle, and his debut collection of poems and stories is (life:) razorblades included.

He is also the brain behind Eight Cuts Gallery, an Oxford-based literary project that ‘combines publishing, live shows, online exhibitions, and promoting the very best literary things I find’. Find out more about it here.

Laila wrote a play for her nursery group when she was three, then moved into poetry and has not turned back. She now performs regularly in London and is working on putting together her first pamphlet.

As part of the Keats House Poet’s Forum, she perform monthly at the poet’s home in Hampstead and the collective are collaborating with museums across the capitol as part of the “Stories of the World” Cultural Olympics project. Laila has lead poetry workshops and performed at the Hamswell Festival in Bath, White Night festival in Brighton and opened the Keats House Festival, reading alongside Anne Marie Fyfe and Benjamin Zephaniah.

She recently hosted a poetry and human rights event at the “Humanitea Rooms” and finds a lot of her work reflects on themes of identity and rights. Laila is currently involved in an eclectic range of ongoing projects including running workshops for young people at the Museum of Transport and documenting war anecdotes from Bosnian survivors through her work with Most Mira, an art and reconciliation NGO.

Our fourth featured guest, and the first to be introduced here, is Jill Wallis.

Jill Wallis has turned to poetry at key times in her life. Mainly she has written for fun, especially satirical poems/songs to be performed by her team at end of term parties, when she was a Head of English in a Bedfordshire comprehensive school. The Government was always generous in providing ample material to satirise in the world of education! She is also part of the RRRANTS performance poetry group. However her major work was produced following the death of her much loved husband, Chris, at the age of 48, from a brain tumour. Prevented by his illness from having the conversations with him she longed to have, she found she needed to write these down in the months that followed. The result was a collection called Dialogue for One, which won the inaugural Littoral poetry magazine prize. She continues to write poetry, partly about life on her own but also about the countryside around her Buckinghamshire village home, where she loves to walk. She is a University lecturer in her spare time!

Jill is currently the poetry editor for the annual Rhyme and Reason book of local poetry and prose, published and sold to raise money for the Iain Rennie Hospice at Home. Submissions for the 2013 book, on the theme of ‘The Seasons’, will be welcome soon.